As portable electronic devices become more compact, and the amount of information to be processed and stored increases, it has become a significant challenge to design a user interface that allows users to easily interact with the device. This is unfortunate because the user interface is the gateway through which users receive not only content but also responses to user actions or behaviors, including user attempts to access a device's features or tools. Some portable electronic devices (e.g., mobile telephones, sometimes called mobile phones, cell phones, cellular telephone, and the like) have resorted to adding more pushbuttons, increasing the density of push buttons, overloading the functions of pushbuttons, or using complex menu systems to allow a user to access, store and manipulate data. These conventional user interfaces often result in complicated key sequences and menu hierarchies that must be memorized by the user. In addition, as the number of pushbuttons has increased, the proximity of neighboring buttons often makes it difficult for users to activate a desired pushbutton.
Some portable devices now have user interfaces based on a touch-sensitive display (also known as a “touch screen”). The user interacts with a graphical user interface via the touch-sensitive display. The user may operate the interface with a stylus or a digit (e.g., a finger). These devices typically include soft keyboards for character input. Some portable devices have a plurality of soft keyboards. When a user enters characters into the device, he may need to switch between the multiple keyboards in order to find the character keys he needs. A user who is not familiar with the layouts of the keyboards may look through each of the keyboards in order to find the keyboard with the needed key. This is time consuming and makes the character input process inefficient.
Accordingly, there is a need for more efficient ways to select a soft keyboard from a plurality of soft keyboards.